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A Guide to My Writing Here at Big Other

I’ve done a lot of posting since I started writing here (in December 2009). To make it all easier to navigate (both for myself and others), as well as to encourage folks to check out some of my older articles, I’ve gathered links to all of my posts and organized them by subject (below). I tried to keep cross-indexing to a minimum, although there is some. I also revised the titles of about two dozen posts to more clearly indicate their contents. Additionally, I wrote explanatory notes to better explain what’s lurking behind most of these links. And, finally, I took the liberty of highlighting what I believe to be my best posts…

Features — a link to the “Features” section of this blog, where I’ve been embedding feature-length films that are up at YouTube

From “Doom House” to “Mood House”: How Simple Aesthetic Strategies Can Create Experimental Films: Part 1 | Part 2 — an analysis of the short films “Doom House” and its more experimental successor, “Mood House”

“The 20 Greatest Liquid Television Segments” — a list from another site; I linked to it mainly because I was struck by the very dated aesthetic of the works discussed there (as well as by the reminder that MTV once showed exceptional experimental short films)

Alternative Values in Small-Press Culture — an argument that the “dominant values” of celebrity, youth, and money (in US culture and small-press culture) should be replaced with community, health, and support

Spoken Word Artist Peter Wyngarde — an appreciation of that actor’s unjustly forgotten 1970 album When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head, as well as his performance as General Klytus in Flash Gordon and how he helped inspired the X-Men‘s Hellfire Club

The Barthelme Problem — a criticism of the tendency in small press/academic literature to overvalue complicated, highly stylized prose

Why Do We Have Readings? (A Polemic) — a criticism of a persistent phenomenon in the literary culture, in which MFA programs, slam poets, and performance poetry scenes essentially ignore one another, each one claiming to be “the contemporary poetry scene”

Incidentally, if my fiction interests you (or if even the thought of it intrigues you), please check out my personal website, where you’ll find links to my publishers and the stories I’ve published online.

Looking at Movements, part 2: Post-Punk — what aesthetic principles united Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, Gang of Four, The Raincoats, X-Ray Specs, Wire, Magazine, Pere Ubu, Kleenex (LiLiPUT), Public Image Ltd., The Fall, The Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, and others?

Looking at Movements, part 3: No Wave — what aesthetic principles united DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, Mars, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Bush Tetras, and others?

R.I.P. Trish Keenan (of Broadcast) — a remembrance; I don’t know her work too well, but I’m rather fond of Broadcast’s third album, and was very sad to hear of her untimely death

Spoken Word Artist Peter Wyngarde — an appreciation of that actor’s unjustly forgotten 1970 album When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head, as well as his performance as General Klytus in Flash Gordon and how he helped inspired the X-Men‘s Hellfire Club

What Is Experimental Art? — part of me believes this is the best thing I’ve written for this site: it’s an examination of the often-conflated terms “avant-garde,” “experimental,” and “innovative,” and an attempt to redefine and reconcile them

“The 20 Greatest Liquid Television Segments” — a list from another site; I linked to it mainly because I was struck by the very dated aesthetic of the works discussed there (as well as by the reminder that MTV once showed exceptional experimental short films)